Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a joint hearing of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in Washington on April 10, 2018.(Photo: Jack Gruber, USA TODAY)

Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before a Senate panel on Tuesday could be summed up in two sentences: “I’m sorry.” And “we’re working on this.”

The Facebook CEO apologized for allowing a British company named Cambridge Analytica to gain private information on as many as 87 million Americans in its bid to influence the 2016 election. He also laid out a number of steps the company would take to better understand what had happened and to prevent similar episodes in future.

In other words, more of the same. Facebook’s 14-year history has been one episode after another of sharing people’s data in inappropriate ways and then apologizing for it. In 2007, for instance, it launched a program called Beacon that tracked people’s habits on the Web outside of Facebook and then provided the data to Facebook advertisers. In 2010, the company was caught selling data that could be used to uncover the real world identity of Facebook users.

It’s hard to say what was gained by Zuckerberg’s testimony. He was cool under pressure. And he fielded questions that gave him the chance to look deferential and unthreatening even as he was impossibly vague in the steps his company would take.

In fact, the hearing probably did more to reassure Facebook users than to take the company to task. Which raises the question of what the Senate hoped to accomplish in bringing Zuckerberg to the Capitol.

The Facebook case could satisfactorily go in one of two directions:

►Congress could decide that new laws and regulations are needed to protect users of Facebook and other social media services. But senators gave little indication Tuesday that they knew what form those laws and regulations would take, or whether they could even be enacted without becoming overly burdensome, subject to extensive gaming or becoming obsolete as soon as they went into effect.

►The other approach would be a widespread consumer rebellion against Facebook that hits the company’s bottom line and forces real change. In this scenario — likely the better one — Congress would play a supportive role, presenting facts that enable people to push back against the company.

If that was the intention, the two Senate committees that called Zuckerberg to testify failed miserably.

Their questions were all over the map and sometimes ill-informed. They offered plenty of bluster, like when Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., warned Zuckerberg that if he didn’t fix his company's problems, the government would. And they went way off topic like when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, complained about the company's liberal bias. But there was little that could change the dynamic.

What’s more, putting Zuckerberg on television was bound to backfire. At just 33, and with a cherubic appearance that makes him look half that age, Zuckerberg hardly seems like the head of the planet’s most powerful media organization. If Hollywood were to create a movie about a company with a history of collecting and sharing troubling amounts of information about us, its CEO would not look a thing like Zuckerberg.

If anything, the Senate hearing on Tuesday pointed to a third direction — a giant shrug as politicians conclude that they don’t understand the issue well enough to provide a constructive response. That would be a shame as it would likely lead to another 14 years of serial privacy breaches followed by heartfelt apologies and little real change.